Boing Boing » Journalismhttp://boingboing.net
Brain candy for Happy MutantsTue, 31 Mar 2015 20:44:12 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Molly Crabapple's FBI file is 7,526 pages long (UPDATED, it's worse)http://boingboing.net/2015/02/02/molly-crabapples-fbi-file-is.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/02/molly-crabapples-fbi-file-is.html#commentsMon, 02 Feb 2015 17:00:40 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=361655
After a protracted battle with the Bureau, artist and journalist Molly Crabapple (previously) has gotten them to admit that they're keeping a whopping file on her, which they will release to her lawyers at the rate of 750 (heavily redacted) pages/month for the next ten months.]]>
After a protracted battle with the Bureau, artist and journalist Molly Crabapple (previously) has gotten them to admit that they're keeping a whopping file on her, which they will release to her lawyers at the rate of 750 (heavily redacted) pages/month for the next ten months.

UPDATE: Molly Crabapple writes, "Quick correction- I initially mistweeted that they'll give me 750 pages a month.
They'll actually review 750 pages a month, give me what they feel like, and when I get them all, we can sue if I think they're holding out too much."

The FBI now says it has 7526 pages related to me, and will start releasing them to my lawyers at a rate of 750 a month #FOIA

http://boingboing.net/2015/02/02/molly-crabapples-fbi-file-is.html/feed0Barrett Brown’s sentence is unjust, but it may become the norm for journalistshttp://boingboing.net/2015/01/26/barrett-browns-sentence-is.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/26/barrett-browns-sentence-is.html#commentsMon, 26 Jan 2015 17:47:48 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=360344was sentenced to an obscene 63 months in prison on Thursday, in part for sharing a hyperlink to a stolen document that he did not steal, and despite the fact that he was not guilty of a crime for linking to it.

Maybe journalists think this is an anomaly, and some will ignore his case entirely since Brown also pled guilty to other charges that led to part of his sentence too. But be warned: if the White House passes its dramatic expansion of US computer law, journalists will constantly be under similar threat and reporting on hacked documents could become a crime.

How is this possible, you ask? Well, first it’s important to understand the details of Brown’s case.

The curious case of Barrett Brown

Brown—a longtime journalist and activist has written for Vanity Fair, the Onion, and the Guardian—has been the subject of a controversial government witchhunt for more than two years now, stemming from his association with members of the hacker collective Anonymous and his own journalism website known as “Project PM,” which investigated shadowy intelligence contractors like Booz Allen (long before Edward Snowden made them a household name).

The FBI relentlessly pursued Brown for his relationship with source and hacker Jeremy Hammond, who last year pled guilty to hacking into Stratfor, the intelligence contractor whose emails were the subject of that notorious link. It’s important to note: the FBI never accused Brown of hacking. (For more on this, read Anonymous expert Biella Coleman in Slate: “Barrett Brown isn’t a hacker, but he’s being punished like one.”)

However, the FBI would eventually charge Brown with obstruction of justice and threatening an FBI agent that stemmed from his reaction to their hacking investigation, and also included a charge of “trafficking” in stolen information for merely sharing a hyperlink with his collaborators on Project PM.

The hyperlink, which Brown just copied from an Anonymous chatroom into a private Project PM chatroom, led to a trove of the Statfor documents, some which contained newsworthy information, and some which also contained private credentials. In other words, it’s the type of link journalists share between each other and on Twitter all the time.

After Brown’s lawyers wrote a blistering legal brief accusing the Justice Department of violating the First Amendment, the government swiftly drop the linking indictment, but Brown eventually had to plead guilty to three lesser charges (including threatening an FBI agent, which Brown freely admitted in court was wrong and stupid).

But you’d think that would be the end of trying to punish him for linking. But at the sentencing hearing on Thursday, the Justice Department again brought the hyperlink up, arguing that even though Brown was NOT charged for the linking to a public document, he should still be punished more for his other crimes because it is “relevant conduct.”

So instead of being sentenced for just his crimes, Brown—as explained in detail here by his defense attorney Marlo Cadeddu—got at least a year more in jail because the judge accepted the argument sharing a hyperlink—his First Amendment right, mind you—should factor into a longer sentence.

This ruling puts journalists in the position of either not talking to hackers/foreigners or printing what they say w/o checking their facts.

This should be worrying for all journalists, that reporting on controversial topics can be used against you when being sentenced for other, unrelated crimes. As longtime security journalist Quinn Norton wrote after Brown’s sentence, “I can’t look at the specific data another journalist has, and I can’t pass it along to a security expert, without feeling like there’s risk to the journalists I work with, the security experts, and myself.”

But it’s could get far worse than that soon.

The White House’s plan to make sharing certain links a crime

Part of the reason the Justice Department likely dropped the linking charge against Brown to begin with, besides the obvious press freedom concerns, was because he had no intent to defraud. In fact, he repeatedly stated he did not want to use or publish the credit card numbers found in the documents, only the newsworthy information.

The trouble comes in a section where the White House removes the phrase “with the intent to defraud” from the section criminalizing “trafficking” in passwords. So instead of sharing passwords for the purpose of committing fraud, you know merely have to share them purposefully with the knowledge they may be used by others.

So stories derived from document dumps like the Sony hacks, where passwords are intermixed with a ton of other newsworthy documents (and where the passwords were was a newsworthy story in itself), become a lot riskier for news organizations to report. Merely sharing a link between reporter and editor may be a criminal act.

Or what about stories that are about passwords? At the end of every year, stories inevitably pop up about the “most common passwords,” which are quite popular with readers, but are also are generated through analyzing passwords that were stolen and then posted online.

These stories are often framed as amusing, but actually should be helpful to readers in explaining why they should be better protecting their security by not using the same, easily guessable password for various websites. Under the White House’s proposal, the journalists producing these stories might be committing a crime.

Good news! — The U.S. government decided today that because I did such a good job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now going to send me to investigate the prison-industrial complex. For the next 35 months, I’ll be provided with free food, clothes, and housing as I seek to expose wrongdoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and staff and otherwise report on news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system. I want to thank the Department of Justice for having put so much time and energy into advocating on my behalf; rather than holding a grudge against me for the two years of work I put into in bringing attention to a DOJ-linked campaign to harass and discredit journalists like Glenn Greenwald, the agency instead labored tirelessly to ensure that I received this very prestigious assignment. — Wish me luck!”

]]>http://boingboing.net/2015/01/26/barrett-browns-sentence-is.html/feed0Journalist Barrett Brown sentenced to 63 months in federal prisonhttp://boingboing.net/2015/01/22/barrettbrown.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/22/barrettbrown.html#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 19:32:56 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=359724A court in Dallas has sentenced Barrett Brown to 63 months in federal prison, minus 28 months already served. For count one in the case, he receives 48 months. For count 2, he receives 12 months. And for count 3, he receives 3 months. He is also ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution.

"Journalists are especially vulnerable right now, Your Honor, and they become more so when the FBI feels comfortable making false claims about them," Brown wrote:

Deny being a spokesperson for Anonymous hundreds of times, and you’re still a spokesperson for Anonymous. Deny being a journalist once or twice, and you’re not a journalist. What conclusion can one draw from this sort of reasoning other than that you are whatever the FBI finds it convenient for you to be at any given moment. This is not the “rule of law”, Your Honor, it is the “rule of law enforcement”, and it is very dangerous.

Brown originally faced more than a century in prison on a swathe of charges relating hacks targeting corporations. He admitted lesser crimes to reduce his possible sentence to 8½ years.

Published in Vanity Fair, The Guardian and elsewhere, Brown is often described as an "unofficial spokesperson" for the Anonymous collective, which he denies. He founded Project PM, a website intended to collate publicly-leaked information for use by journalists and activists.

Among the secrets exposed were collaborative efforts between the government and private contractors to monitor social networks, and to develop online surveillance systems.

Brown, 33, was arrested in 2012 after his and his mothers' homes were raided and he used "threatening" language toward FBI officers in a response posted to YouTube. He was subsequently accused of working with the hackers whose efforts yielded a huge tranche of embarrassing and revealing information concerning misbehavior and sleaze at U.S. government contractors.

Among the charges was the claim that merely linking to the leaked information was illegal—an alleged crime for which prosecutors sought decades in prison and which roused the interest of press freedom groups.

He ultimately signed a plea deal on three lesser charges: transmitting a threat, trying to hide a laptop computer during a raid, and to being "accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to a protected computer." He spent a year awaiting trial in federal prison, and was subject to a 6-month gag order prohibiting him from discussing his case with the media.

Tweets from observers, activists, and journalists present at today' sentencing hearing in the Dallas courtroom follow.

We’ve long known the Justice Department’s stance on transparency has been hypocritical and disingenuous. But they’ve really outdone themselves this time.

Last week, the agency secretly helped kill a bipartisan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reform bill that was based word-for-word on its own policy.

First, a little background: In a surprise to some, the very modest FOIA Improvements Act died in Congress last Thursday, despite virtually unanimous support in both houses. The bill was completely uncontroversial. It merely would have upgraded agencies’ ability to accept FOIAs electronically and codified existing policy—mainly President Obama’s now infamous January 20, 2009 memo in which he ordered federal agencies to operate under a “presumption of openness.”

All Speaker John Boehner had to do on the last day before Congress adjourned for the year was bring the bill up for a vote, and it would’ve been whisked through to the President’s desk. A similar bill had already passed the House unanimously earlier in the year.

Yet for some unknown reason at the time, he didn’t. On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported on the inside story behind the last-minute death of the bill, and the blame centers on the Justice Department:

According to House aides, some lawmakers balked at the legislation because several agencies, including the Justice Department, warned that those making information requests would use the “foreseeable harm” requirement as the basis for frequent lawsuits.

The “foreseeable harm” section referred to by the Post would force federal agencies to justify withholding information if they wished to do so. Essentially, they would have to show the information would cause “foreseeable harm” if released. Not exactly a tall order. But what makes the Justice Department's objection so shocking is that this “foreseeable harm” provision would not deviate at all from the Justice Department’s own policy. In fact, it was based on it.

In a March 19, 2009 memo to all federal agencies, Attorney General Eric Holder himself wrote that the Justice Department would carry out Obama’s aforementioned transparency order by rescinding the Bush DOJ’s more restrictive FOIA rules and designating new ones. From that moment on, Holder declared:

[T]he Department of Justice will defend a denial of a FOIA request only if (1) the agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by one of the statutory exemptions, or (2) disclosure is prohibited by law.

Now read full text of the provision in the just-killed FOIA reform bill that the Justice Department allegedly objected to:

An agency shall withhold information under this section only if a) the agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by an exemption described in subsection or other provision of law; or b) disclosure is prohibited by law.

As can be seen, the two passages are virtually identical. How does the Justice Department think this provision will lead to more lawsuits it would have to defend if they’re not supposed to be defending those lawsuits in the first place?

The Justice Department is objecting to making its own supposed policy the law, and confirms what many have long believed: the agency does not want to—or have to—comply with its own FOIA rules.

We had a feeling that the Justice Department was behind the initial delay in getting the bill passed months ago after receiving a tip from a knowledgeable source. In July we filed a FOIA request for emails between the Justice Department and the offices of the FOIA bill’s co-sponsors John Cornyn and Patrick Leahy that discuss the agency’s position on the bill. We’ve been waiting six months and still have gotten no response.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/17/obamas-justice-department-s.html/feed0Spain's Xnet: leak-publishing corruption-fightershttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/15/spains-xnet-leak-publishing.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/15/spains-xnet-leak-publishing.html#commentsMon, 15 Dec 2014 14:05:21 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=353458Xnet is a Spanish collective that invites the public to leak evidence of corruption using the Tor anonymizer, then uses those leaks to bring private criminal complaints against officials and corporations.]]>Xnet is a Spanish collective that invites the public to leak evidence of corruption using the Tor anonymizer, then uses those leaks to bring private criminal complaints against officials and corporations.

Spain's law allows private parties to ask a judge to consider criminal charges. Xnet's 200+ volunteers are inspired by Wikileaks, and use crowdfunding to raise money to pay lawyers to pursue the private criminal matters.

Their biggest success to date was a suit over the bailed-out Bankia bank, whose senior execs used off-the-books Bankia credit credit cards to buy €15M worth of luxury goods, vacations, and groceries. Xnet raised €20K in 24h to sue Bankia.

I've had a lot of people send me this story because the guerrilla network in my novel Little Brother is called Xnet, but as far as I know, there's no relation (though these Xnet characters sound like pretty amazing and inspiring activists!).

Only those activists registered as journalists can read the emails in the drop box because Spanish law protects their professional right to withhold the informer's identity in court.

The journalist activists filter the messages and usually discount 90 per cent of the material sent in - gossip, complaints not backed up by evidence, personal information sent by separated couples or jilted lovers. Reports are drawn up on the remaining 10 per cent considered worthy of follow-up, which are sent to a second mailbox that other Xnet members can access without seeing the original sender's identity.

"All this stuff about hackers getting into a company's systems and stealing information is a Hollywood myth. It's not how it works in reality," explained Sergio Salgado, an Xnet activist. "We know systems are watched now, after the (Edward) Snowden case. We have to take precautions but what we do is public."

Most of the information Xnet activists gather is fed to Spanish media as a kind of tip service so journalists can probe deeper. The original informer can choose whether to give their name or stay anonymous.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/15/spains-xnet-leak-publishing.html/feed0Why journalists should be free speech partisanshttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/03/why-journalists-should-be-free.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/03/why-journalists-should-be-free.html#commentsThu, 04 Dec 2014 06:00:02 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=351194
Following on the New York Times's decision to continue its critical coverage of China, despite the Chinese government's retaliation against it, Dan Gillmor calls on journalists and news organizations to abandon the pretense of "neutrality" and take a partisan stand for free speech in questions of censorship, surveillance, net neutrality, copyright takedown, and other core issues of speech in the 21st century.]]>
Following on the New York Times's decision to continue its critical coverage of China, despite the Chinese government's retaliation against it, Dan Gillmor calls on journalists and news organizations to abandon the pretense of "neutrality" and take a partisan stand for free speech in questions of censorship, surveillance, net neutrality, copyright takedown, and other core issues of speech in the 21st century.

What are these choke points? The most obvious is what’s happening to the Internet itself. In America and a number of other countries the telecommunications industry — often working with government, and in some cases outright owned by government — is deciding, or insisting on the right to decide, what bits of information get to people’s devices in what order and at what speed, or whether they get there at all. This is what network neutrality is all about in the U.S.: whether we, at the edges of the networks, get to make those decisions or whether telecom companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T will ultimately have that power, as they insist they need. The worries about corporate media consolidation in the 1990s seem quaint next to this kind of consolidation. Free speech? It’ll be as free a Comcast et al want it to be if they get the upper hand.

Surveillance, too, has become a method for government — again, often working with big companies — to keep track of what journalists and activists are doing, well beyond the avowed mission of stopping terrorism and solving crimes.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/03/why-journalists-should-be-free.html/feed0Verizon's new big budget tech-news site prohibits reporting on NSA spying or net neutralityhttp://boingboing.net/2014/10/29/verizons-new-big-budget-tech.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/29/verizons-new-big-budget-tech.html#commentsWed, 29 Oct 2014 13:54:29 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=341582
They're positioning the new site "Sugar String" as a well-funded competitor to Wired, but reporters are not allowed to mention NSA spying (in which Verizon was an enthusiastic partner) or net neutrality (which Verizon has devoted itself to killing, with campaigns of overt lobbying and covert dirty tricks).]]>
They're positioning the new site "Sugar String" as a well-funded competitor to Wired, but reporters are not allowed to mention NSA spying (in which Verizon was an enthusiastic partner) or net neutrality (which Verizon has devoted itself to killing, with campaigns of overt lobbying and covert dirty tricks).

Cole Stryker, Sugar String's editor-in-chief, sent recruiting letters to reporters last week offering them jobs at the site on the condition that they pretend that the major investor's major embarrassments -- which have made headlines all over the world on a virtually daily basis -- didn't exist.

Reporters are, however, permitted to write about net neutrality violations and mass surveillance by governments not allied to the US, particularly China.

This is part of a worrying trend: as Patrick Howell O'Neill points out, Chevron bought the Richmond Standard with money it found between the sofa cushions and now the paper reports on everything except negative press about Richmond's enormous Chevron refinery.

Virtually every story currently on the front page of SugarString—articles about GPS being used by law enforcement, anonymity hardware enabling digital activists, and artists on the Deep Web—would typically include information on American surveillance of the Internet or net neutrality to give the reader the context to make sure she’s fully informed.

But none of the current articles do that. At best, they dance around the issue and talk about how other countries aside from the U.S. conduct surveillance. That self-censorship puts blinders on the reader, never giving her all the information she should have—information that, not coincidentally, tends to make Verizon and other powerful interests look very, very bad.

Emergent presents a list of rumors circulating online and the current best estimate of their veracity.

You can view a list of rumors being tracked on the homepage, along with their current claim state (True, False, Unverified). Click on a story to visit a page that visualizes the sources reporting the rumor, and a breakdown of social shares per source. You can also click on individual articles on the story page to see specific revision and social share data about that article. For more detail about how Emergent works, check out the posts on our blog.

The membership subs go to support the newspaper's award-winning, public-interest investigative journalism, which included the Snowden leaks and the Wikileaks dumps, as well as the Parliamentary expenses scandal. They're turning that news into live events -- it's newspaper as performance art.

The event-space/member's club will also have a 3D printing lab, a coffee house, a restaurant, galleries, and spaces.

I've joined as a founding member.

But (as the music industry has found) the more digital the world becomes, so the appetite for physical meet-ups and live events grows. The Guardian’s journey into this live world, which began modestly with our open weekend in 2012, is about to begin with a soft launch, or (in digital language) beta phase. We would love as many of you as possible to be part of it, and to contribute your own thoughts to help us shape how the scheme develops.

The greatest Guardian editor, CP Scott, wrote perhaps the most famous essay on journalism ever written, to mark the paper’s centenary in 1921. By then he had not only edited the paper for 46 years, he had also become its owner. This was his vision of what the Guardian should be:

A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. … It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces.

Bellingcat kickstarted £51K to do data-driven/crowdsourced citizen journalism earlier this month, and a week later, pinpointed the exact location of an ISIS training camp near Mosul by matching the jihadis' social media posts to online maps and geo-location services.

]]>

Bellingcat kickstarted £51K to do data-driven/crowdsourced citizen journalism earlier this month, and a week later, pinpointed the exact location of an ISIS training camp near Mosul by matching the jihadis' social media posts to online maps and geo-location services.

It's a very clever sleuthing exercise, and shows the positive power of groups of online puzzle-solvers -- a contrast with the redditor mob that incorrectly accused an innocent man of being the Boston Marathon bomber.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go through training as an ISIS terrorist? Or better yet, where you would go to find such advanced training? All you have to do to find the answer to these questions is turn to the nearest ISIS media twitter account and click on that bright blue Justpaste.it link. Let’s take a look at the photos posted in July showing one of the Islamic State’s training camps in Ninewa Province and see what we can learn.

Getty Images photographer Scott Olson (center) is arrested by a highway patrol officer during a protest for the shooting death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri August 18, 2014. Authorities say he was arrested because police required media to be within certain areas. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon lifted the curfew for the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson on Monday and began deploying National Guard troops to oversee protests sparked by the fatal shooting of the black unarmed teenager by a white policeman. REUTERS/Joshua Lott.

It should go without saying that these arrests are a gross violation of the reporters' First Amendment rights, and attempts to prevent journalists from lawfully doing their job on the streets of Ferguson are downright illegal. We will be documenting each journalist arrest below and are filing public records requests for the arrest records of the journalists who have been assaulted, detained, and arrested in Ferguson. All requests are publicly available on MuckRock.

We insist that the St. Louis County Police Department, Ferguson Police Department, and Missouri Highway Patrol cease and desist from violating the Constiutional rights of reporters covering the protests, and respect the court document they all signed agreeing that the media and members of the public have a right to record public events without abridgement. This document is not necessary, as the First Amendment provides that right to all members of the media and public, but it's an indication of how the police have decided to ignore the law.

Freedom of the Press Foundation is monitoring the situation and will be filing requests and updating this blog post for as long as necessary.

[Editor's note: Guest contributor Runa A. Sandvik is a privacy and security researcher, working at the intersection of technology, law and policy. She is a Forbes contributor, a technical advisor to the TrueCrypt Audit project, and a member of the review board for Black Hat Europe. Prior to joining the Freedom of the Press Foundation as a full-time technologist in June 2014, she worked with The Tor Project for four years.]]]>

http://boingboing.net/2014/08/19/documenting-the-arrests-of-jou.html/feed0Germany is NSA's largest listening post, according to new report based on Snowden leakshttp://boingboing.net/2014/06/18/germany-is-nsas-largest-list.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/18/germany-is-nsas-largest-list.html#commentsWed, 18 Jun 2014 19:42:28 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=312334A general view of the large former monitoring base of the U.S. intelligence organization National Security Agency (NSA) during break of dawn in Bad Aibling south of Munich, July 11, 2013.]]>

A general view of the large former monitoring base of the U.S. intelligence organization National Security Agency (NSA) during break of dawn in Bad Aibling south of Munich, July 11, 2013. Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended Germany's cooperation with U.S. intelligence, dismissing comparisons of its techniques to those used in communist East Germany in an attempt to ease tensions a day before talks on the thorny issue in Washington. REUTERS/Michael Dalder

Using documents leaked by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, Der Spiegel reports that the NSA has turned Germany into its most important base of operations in Europe. "NSA is more active in Germany than anywhere else in Europe," reports the paper, "And data collected here may have helped kill suspected terrorists."

The German archive provides the basis for a critical discussion on the necessity and limits of secret service work as well as on the protection of privacy in the age of digital communication. The documents complement the debate over a trans-Atlantic relationship that has been severely damaged by the NSA affair.

They paint a picture of an all-powerful American intelligence agency that has developed an increasingly intimate relationship with Germany over the past 13 years while massively expanding its presence. No other country in Europe plays host to a secret NSA surveillance architecture comparable to the one in Germany. It is a web of sites defined as much by a thirst for total control as by the desire for security. In 2007, the NSA claimed to have at least a dozen active collection sites in Germany.

The documents indicate that the NSA uses its German sites to search for a potential target by analyzing a "Pattern of Life," in the words of one Snowden file. And one classified report suggests that information collected in Germany is used for the "capture or kill" of alleged terrorists.

Denial is powerful. It can be a crucial coping tool when experiencing loss or trauma, but it also can unmoor you from reality. From the time I lost most of my left arm in February, I was living in that parallel universe, one where I’d power through, barely acknowledging the amputation—until I went for a run on the sunny afternoon of April 6.

It was nothing more than a slightly uneven sidewalk that took me down. No problem for a runner with two arms. In fact, this particular sidewalk is right behind my home, and I had negotiated it uneventfully for years. But here are two things you need to know about life after an arm amputation: First, your center of gravity changes dramatically when you are suddenly eight pounds lighter on one side of your body. Second, while my arm may be missing physically, it is there, just as it always has been, in my mind’s eye. I can feel every digit. I can even feel the watch that was always strapped to my left wrist. When I tripped, I reached reflexively to break my very real fall with my completely imaginary left hand. My fall was instead broken by my nose, and my nose was broken by my fall.

Lying on that sidewalk, moaning in pain, I reached the end of Denial River and flowed into the Sea of Doubt. It finally dawned on me in that instant that I was, indeed, handicapped. That may not be the term of choice these days—“differently abled” or “physically challenged” may be de rigueur—but as I touched my bloody face, feeling embedded chips of concrete in the wounds, “handicapped” sure seemed to fit.

The woman I was passing on the sidewalk when I fell took one look at me and cried out in panic to her husband: “My God, what’s happened to his arm?” “It’s gone,” I said. “But don’t worry, that didn’t happen today.”

http://boingboing.net/2014/06/12/lifeafter.html/feed0George Orwell's National Union of Journalists cardhttp://boingboing.net/2014/06/12/george-orwells-national-unio.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/12/george-orwells-national-unio.html#commentsThu, 12 Jun 2014 16:00:23 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=310658From his work with the Tribune. I'm a proud member of the same union.
]]>From his work with the Tribune. I'm a proud member of the same union.
]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/06/12/george-orwells-national-unio.html/feed0Twitter account that de-bullshitizes linkbaity headlineshttp://boingboing.net/2014/06/06/twitter-account-that-de-bullsh.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/06/twitter-account-that-de-bullsh.html#commentsFri, 06 Jun 2014 22:00:22 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=309100The @Savedyouaclick Twitter account decodes linkbaity headlines so you don't have to click on things that aren't likely interesting to you.]]>The @Savedyouaclick Twitter account decodes linkbaity headlines so you don't have to click on things that aren't likely interesting to you.

Sexism. RT @Slate: What we found while lurking on an anonymous college message board for two years will disgust you:

I'm foursquare for headlines that are punchy and intriguing, but I'm also a believer in "attention conservation" -- a headline should try to convey both the substance and the fascination of the piece, but not by withholding information that, if you had it, would dissuade you from clicking altogether.

He was happy to be there. Really opened up. RT @eonline: John Legend opens up about Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's "beautiful" wedding!

http://boingboing.net/2014/06/06/twitter-account-that-de-bullsh.html/feed0House approves 'media shield' amendment, as reporter reveals 2011 subpoena fighthttp://boingboing.net/2014/05/30/house-passes-federal-shield.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/05/30/house-passes-federal-shield.html#commentsSat, 31 May 2014 02:10:07 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=307311
The House of Representatives today voted 225-183 to approve an appropriations bill amendment that bars the Justice Department from forcing reporters to testify about their confidential sources.]]>The House of Representatives today voted 225-183 to approve an appropriations bill amendment that bars the Justice Department from forcing reporters to testify about their confidential sources.

In related news, a former Fox News reporter this week shared more about his 2011 subpoena fight. In a report on the ABC News website, where he now works, Mike Levine explains that he was subpoenaed in January 2011 about his sources for a 2009 story. Levine fought the order, and the Justice Department dropped it in April 2012.

It’s unclear what that will mean for the Times’ Risen, who is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on his case after a federal appeals court ruled against him. But in what might be the only other instance of Holder’s Justice Department subpoenaing a reporter to testify about his confidential sources, federal prosecutors ultimately backed down.

“The reporter” in this second, previously undisclosed case is the author of this article. In January 2011, while I was working for Fox News, the Justice Department persuaded a federal grand jury in Washington to subpoena me for my confidential sources after I reported two years earlier that several Somali-Americans were secretly indicted in Minneapolis for joining an al Qaeda-linked group in Somalia.

Professional and personal life under the threat of jail for 16 subsequent months is best captured in a note I wrote to myself at the time: “I've felt like throwing up all day so far … Just that 'racing heart' feeling throughout."

Still, I felt I had to protect my confidential sources.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder addresses reporters at a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. on May 14, 2013. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

The subpoena is the second of its kind to come to light under the Obama administration, which also has tried to force James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times, to testify in the trial of a former Central Intelligence Agency officer charged with leaking to him.
A federal appeals court has ruled that Mr. Risen must testify. He has appealed that ruling, and the Supreme Court may announce as soon as Monday whether it will hear the case.

http://boingboing.net/2014/05/30/house-passes-federal-shield.html/feed0Greenwald's "No Place to Hide": a compelling, vital narrative about official criminalityhttp://boingboing.net/2014/05/28/greenwalds-no-place-to-hid.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/05/28/greenwalds-no-place-to-hid.html#commentsWed, 28 May 2014 11:52:06 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=306436Cory Doctorow reviews Glenn Greenwald's long-awaited No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. More than a summary of the Snowden leaks, it's a compelling narrative that puts the most explosive revelations about official criminality into vital context.]]>
Glenn Greenwald's long-awaited No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State is more than a summary of the Snowden leaks: it's a compelling narrative that puts the most explosive revelations about official criminality into vital context.

No Place has something for everyone. It opens like a spy-thriller as Greenwald takes us through his adventures establishing contact with Snowden and flying out to meet him -- thanks to the technological savvy and tireless efforts of Laura Poitras, and those opening chapters are real you-are-there nailbiters as we get the inside story on the play between Poitras and Greenwald, Snowden, the Guardian, Bart Gellman and the Washington Post.

Greenwald offers us some insight into Snowden's character, which has been something of a cipher until now, as the spy sought to keep the spotlight on the story instead of the person. This turns out to have been a very canny move, as it has made it difficult for NSA apologists to muddy the waters with personal smears about Snowden and his life. But the character Greenwald introduces us to isn't a lurking embarrassment -- rather, he's a quick-witted, well-spoken, technologically masterful idealist. Exactly the kind of person you'd hope he'd be, more or less: someone with principles and smarts, and the ability to articulate a coherent and ultimately unassailable argument about surveillance and privacy. The world Snowden wants isn't one that's totally free of spying: it's one of well-defined laws, backed by an effective set of checks and balances ensure that spies are servants to democracy, and not the other way around. The spies have acted as if the law allows them to do just about anything to anyone. Snowden insists that if they want that law, they have to ask for it -- announce their intentions, get Congress on side, get a law passed and follow it. Making it up as you go along and lying to Congress and the public doesn't make freedom safe, because freedom starts with the state and its agents following their own rules.

From here, Greenwald shifts gears, diving into the substance of the leaks. There have been other leakers and whistleblowers before Snowden, but no story about leaks has stayed alive in the public's imagination and on the front page for as long as the Snowden files; in part that's thanks to a canny release strategy that has put out stories that follow a dramatic arc. Sometimes, the press will publish a leak just in time to reveal that the last round of NSA and government denials were lies. Sometimes, they'll be a you-ain't-seen-nothing-yet topper for the last round of stories. Whether deliberate or accidental, the order of publication has finally managed to give the mass-spying story that's been around since Mark Klein's 2005 bombshell.

But for all that, the leaks haven't been coherent. Even if you follow them closely -- as I do -- it's sometimes hard to figure out what, exactly, we have learned about the NSA. In part, that's because so much of the NSA's "collect-it-all" strategy involves overlapping ways of getting the same data (often for the purposes of a plausibly deniable parallel construction) so you hear about a new leak and can't figure out how it differs from the last one.

No Place's middle act is a very welcome and well-executed framing of all the leaks to date (some new ones were revealed in the book), putting them in a logical, rather than dramatic or chronological, order. If you can't figure out what the deal is with NSA spying, this section will put you straight, with brief, clear, non-technical explanations that anyone can follow.

The final third is where Greenwald really puts himself back into the story -- specifically, he discusses how the establishment press reacted to his reporting of the story. He characterizes himself as a long-time thorn in the journalistic establishment's side, a gadfly who relentlessly picked at the press's cowardice and laziness. So when famous journalists started dismissing his work as mere "blogging" and called for him to be arrested for reporting on the Snowden story, he wasn't surprised.

But what could have been an unseemly score-settling rebuttal to his critics quickly becomes something more significant: a comprehensive critique of the press's financialization as media empires swelled to the size of defense contractors or oil companies. Once these companies became the establishment, and their star journalists likewise became millionaire plutocrats whose children went to the same private schools as the politicians they were meant to be holding to account, they became tame handmaidens to the state and its worst excesses.

The Klein NSA surveillance story broke in 2005 and quickly sank, having made a ripple not much larger than that of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction or the business of Obama's birth certificate. For nearly a decade, the evidence of breathtaking, lawless, endless surveillance has mounted, without any real pushback from the press. There has been no urgency to this story, despite its obvious gravity, no banner headlines that read ONE YEAR IN, THE CRIMES GO ON. The story -- the government spies on your merest social interaction in a way that would freak you the fuck out if you thought about it for ten seconds -- has become wonkish and complicated, buried in silly arguments about whether "metadata collection" is spying, about the fine parsing of Keith Alexander's denials, and, always, in Soviet-style scaremongering about the terrorists lurking within.

Greenwald doesn't blame the press for creating this situation, but he does place responsibility for allowing it square in their laps. He may linger a little over the personal sleights he's received at the hands of establishment journalists, but it's hard to fault him for wanting to point out that calling yourself a journalist and then asking to have another journalist put in prison for reporting on a massive criminal conspiracy undertaken at the highest level of government makes you a colossal asshole.

The book ends with a beautiful, barn-burning coda in which Greenwald sets out his case for a free society as being free from surveillance. It reads like the transcript of a particularly memorable speech -- an "I have a dream" speech; a "Blood, sweat, toil and tears" speech. It's the kind of speech I could have imagined a young senator named Barack Obama delivering in 2006, back when he had a colorable claim to being someone with a shred of respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. It's a speech I hope to hear Greenwald deliver himself someday.

White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan (R) listens as U.S. President Barack Obama nominates him to become the next CIA director at the White House in Washington January 7, 2013. Reuters.

Despite both the White House and CIA promising a quick declassification review, Politico reported this week that the White House and CIA are now refusing to even answer questions as to when the report will be sent back to the Intelligence Committee for release. Senator Dianne Feinstein said, “I would hope that it would be short and quick. That may be a vain [effort].” Senator Dick Durbin said, “I don’t know what the reason is [for the delay].”

Sadly, it was quite predictable that the White House and CIA would delay the release of a report, which is reportedly devestating in its criticism of the CIA, and will remind the public that the Obama administration refused to hold anyone at the CIA accountable for its crimes. Disturbingly, the CIA itself—the same agency the report accuses of years of prisoner abuse and systematic lying—is in charge of the redaction process for the report, despite the fact that it has already dragged its feet for over a year, has been accused of misleading the Senate Intelligence Committee, and even allegedly spied on its staffers all in an apparent attempt to prevent the report from seeing light.

The UN Special Rappateur on Torture, Juan Mendez—himself a survivor of torture—recently wrote that the CIA’s role in the process “a preposterous conflict of interest,” lamenting that “[o]nce again, the torturers will have the opportunity to censor what the public can know.”

The silence and delay by the US government is all the more reason why the CIA Torture Report should be leaked to the public. Of course, we wish that the official transparency process was not broken, and that the report would go through a fair and quick declassification review. But unfortunately, time and again, the administration has prevented information about government wrongdoing from coming out through official channels.

Last week was the tenth anniversary of the release of the Abu Gharib photos, the first hint the American public received about the torture committed by the US government under the Bush administration. Notably, the public saw these photos only because they were leaked to the press, just like much of the information we would later learn about the CIA’s torture program.

Unfortunately, in recent years the Justice Department has prosecuted a record number of news sources, and Sen. Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has led the charge for more. Worse, Sen. Feinstein—despite advocating for the release of the torture report—has said she’s already referred a leak related to an article by McClatchy about the torture report's findings to the Justice Department.

The government’s crackdown against leaks is one reason why Freedom of the Press Foundation has helped news organizations install SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that helps sources get documents to journalists in a much more anonymous and secure way than email. Currently, journalists at five major news organizations in the United States use SecureDrop. If a potential source wants to use it, they need to follow these simple steps:

Find a public wifi internet connection that is not connected to your work or home, such as a coffee shop.

Here are onion URLs of the five groups of journalists at major US news organizations currently operating SecureDrop:

The Intercept: y6xjgkgwj47us5ca.onion

ProPublica: pubdrop4dw6rk3aq.onion

New Yorker: strngbxhwyuu37a3.onion

Forbes: bczjr6ciiblco5ti.onion

Wired's Kevin Poulsen: poulsensqiv6ocq4.onion

Of course nothing can guarantee 100% security, and sadly any government official would be taking a great personal risk by leaking anything, including the torture report, to journalists. But it increasingly looks like the public will need a brave official willing to take a courageous stand if we are to get real transparency and accountability anytime soon.

http://boingboing.net/2014/05/06/cia.html/feed0Fact-checking Hillary Clinton's comments on Edward Snowden and the NSAhttp://boingboing.net/2014/04/28/fact-checking-hillary-clinton.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/28/fact-checking-hillary-clinton.html#commentsMon, 28 Apr 2014 20:24:27 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=299749Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks to a group of supporters and students at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida February 26, 2014.]]>

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks to a group of supporters and students at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida February 26, 2014. REUTERS/Gaston De Cardenas

Hillary Clinton made her first extended public remarks about Edward Snowden late last week, and unfortunately she misstated some basic facts about the NSA whistleblower and how events have played out in the last year. Here’s a breakdown of what she said and where she went wrong:

Clinton: "If he were concerned and wanted to be part of the American debate, he could have been… I don't understand why he couldn't have been part of the debate at home."

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about Snowden that even NSA reform advocates have furthered. Edward Snowden could not be part of this debate at home, period.

First, as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellbserg explained in the Washington Post, Snowden would likely be in a maximum security prison right now if he remained in the United States, unable to speak to the media. Second and more importantly, Snowden would likely be barred from making any of arguments claiming he was a whistleblower during his trial, since the government is charging him under the draconian Espionage Act of 1917. As we have pointed outrepeatedly, lower court rulings in other cases against leakers have prevented defendants from telling a jury about their intent to inform the American public, the lack of harm their leaks caused, and the benefits to society. The government even tried to bar NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake from mentioning the words “whistleblower” or “First Amendment” during his trial.

Simply put, it would be impossible for Edward Snowden to participate in an informed debate in the public or the courtroom if he was in the United States.

Clinton: "When he emerged and when he absconded with all that material, I was puzzled, because we have all these protections for whistleblowers."

What’s really puzzling is that Ms. Clinton—and President Obama (who has made similar remarks)—is not familiar with the current state of the law as it relates to whistleblowers. Contractors like Snowden lack the protections that federal employees are entitled to, and the government is free to retaliate against such people under the law. As Angela Canterbury, director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, has explained: “[T]here is a gaping loophole for intelligence community contractors. The riskiest whistle-blowing that you can possibly do on the government is as an intelligence contractor.”

Despite the risks, Snowden has said he repeatedly went his superiors with complaints and they were never acted upon. From his interview with Vanity Fair:

“The N.S.A. at this point not only knows I raised complaints, but that there is evidence that I made my concerns known to the N.S.A.’s lawyers, because I did some of it through e-mail. I directly challenge the N.S.A. to deny that I contacted N.S.A. oversight and compliance bodies directly via e-mail and that I specifically expressed concerns about their suspect interpretation of the law, and I welcome members of Congress to request a written answer to this question [from the N.S.A.].”

Clinton: "I have a hard time thinking that somebody who is a champion of privacy and liberty has taken refuge in Russia under Putin's authority."

Snowden did not “take refuge” in Russia at all, and in fact, it’s the fault of the United States government he was stuck there. Snowden’s legal adviser Ben Wizner put it best when asked about this on Meet the Press last year:

I actually think if there is one thing that we all should agree on, it’s that Edward Snowden shouldn’t be in Russia. The reason why he’s in Russia is that the United States revoked his passport when he was transiting through there. And I hope that the U.S. will-- will see that it’s not in anybody’s best interests for him to be there, and that even if he isn’t going to return here, that there should be some other place where he can live.

Clinton: "I think turning over a lot of that material—intentionally or unintentionally, because of the way it can be drained—gave all kinds of information, not only to big countries, but to networks and terrorist groups and the like."

Snowden has repeatedly stated he did not turn over information to anyone besides journalists, he did not even take any data with him to Russia, and the US government has not put forth any evidence that a foreign government has gained access to information that is not in the public record. Thankfully, Snowden is highly trained in protecting data in high-risk places, as he even once taught a DIA course in the subject to other diplomats.

Ms. Clinton is widely considered the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for President in 2016. It’s very possible she was just testing the waters about how to react to the issue of NSA surveillance. We hope she will takes these facts into consideration and adjust her opinion accordingly. Bill Clinton was much more conciliatory and nuanced about people's anger over the NSA when he made comments a few weeks ago, so it would be easy for her to switch gears. And if these tweets are any indication, privacy could be a more important election issue than ever.

Note: Edward Snowden is a member of Freedom of the Press Foundation's board of directors.

The US State Department announced the launch of its third annual "Free the Press" campaign today, which will purportedly highlight "journalists or media outlets that are censored, attacked, threatened, or otherwise oppressed because of their reporting." A noble mission for sure.

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The US State Department announced the launch of its third annual "Free the Press" campaign today, which will purportedly highlight "journalists or media outlets that are censored, attacked, threatened, or otherwise oppressed because of their reporting." A noble mission for sure. But maybe they should kick off the campaign by criticizing their own Justice Department, which on the very same day, has asked the Supreme Court to help them force Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen into jail.

Politico's Josh Gerstein reports that the Justice Department filed a legal brief today urging the Supreme Court to reject Risen's petition to hear his reporter's privilege case, in which the Fourth Circuit ruled earlier this year that James Risen (and all journalists) can be forced to testify against their sources without any regard to the confidentiality required by their profession. This flies in the face of common law precedent all over the country, as well as the clear district court reasoning in Risen's case in 2012. (The government's Supreme Court brief can be read here.)

As Gerstein noted, "The Justice Department brief is unflinchingly hostile to the idea of the Supreme Court creating or finding protections for journalists," and if the Justice Department succeeds "it could place President Barack Obama in the awkward position of presiding over the jailing of a journalist in an administration the president has vowed to make the most transparent in history."

The government does mention it is working with Congress to craft a reporter's shield bill, which should give you some indication that the proposed bill is at best a watered-down, toothless version of what many courts have offered journalists for decades, and that would be no help to James Risen—the exact type of reporter that we should be attempting to protect the most. It's important to remember that in Risen's case, the government has previously analogized reporter's privilege to a criminal receiving drugs from someone and refusing to testify about it.

We'll have more on both the shield law and the Risen case soon, but it's clear that the US government still refuses to walk the walk when providing journalists the protections it says it believes in.

Here's the full interaction between the AP's Matthew Lee and the State Department spokesperson Jennifer Psaki on James Risen and US press freedom at today's State Department briefing:

JENNIFER PSAKI: One more announcement for all of you: With World Press Freedom Day around the world on May 3rd, the department will launch its third annual Free the Press campaign later this afternoon in New York at the U.S. U.N. mission. Beginning on Monday and all of next week, we will highlight emblematic cases of imperiled reporters and media outlets that have been targeted, oppressed, imprisoned or otherwise harassed because of their professional work. The first two cases will be announced by Assistant Secretary -- Assistant Secretary Tom Malinowski later at the -- at U.S. U.N. And we invite you of course to follow Tom at Twitter, who has -- on Twitter who, as you all know, was just confirmed several weeks, @Malinowski and to keep up with human rights issues on DRL's website.

Q: Fair enough. So it does not include those who might have been harassed by --

MS. PSAKI: We highlight, as we often do, where we see issues with media freedom around the world.

Q: Right, I understand. But you would say that you don't -- the U.S. does not believe that it has a problem with press freedom, or if it does, that it's not nearly as severe as the problems in other countries.

MS. PSAKI: We do not. I think we can look at many of the problems --

On media press freedom?

Oh. Go ahead. And then we'll go to you, (Paul ?).

Did you have another question on media press freedom, or --

...

Q: If I could just go back to the overall, in general, the administration does not regard attempting to prosecute American journalists as an infringement of press freedom?

Q: Well, there's several cases that are out there right now. The one that comes -- springs to mind is the James Risen case, where the Justice Department is attempting to prosecute. I just want to be clear. I'm not trying to --

MS. PSAKI: Well, Matt, I --

Q: I just want to know if you regard that as an infringement on press freedom or not. And I suspect that you do not, but I want to make sure that that's the case.

MS. PSAKI: As you know, and I'll, of course, refer to the Department of Justice, but the leaking of classified information is in a separate category. What we're talking about here, as you all know and unfortunately we have talk about on a regular basis here, is the targeting of journalists, the arrests, the imprisonment for simply exercising their ability to tell the story.

Q: Right. I understand that. And we're all, I'm sure, myself and all my colleagues, we're very appreciative of that.

But the reporters in question here have not leaked the information; they simply published it. So is it correct, then, that you don't believe -- you don't regard that as an infringement of press freedom?

The US Director of National Intelligence has issued a Directive [PDF] that forbids most intelligence community employees from talking to journalists about “intelligence-related information” unless they have explicit authorization to do so.

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U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

The US Director of National Intelligence has issued a Directive [PDF] that forbids most intelligence community employees from talking to journalists about “intelligence-related information” unless they have explicit authorization to do so.

Intelligence community employees “must obtain authorization for contacts with the media” on any intel-related matters, and “must also report… unplanned or unintentional contact with the media on covered matters,” according to the Directive signed by James Clapper.

The new Directive reflects — and escalates — tensions between the government and the press over leaks of classified information. It is intended “to mitigate risks of unauthorized disclosures of intelligence-related matters that may result from such contacts.” See Intelligence Community Directive 119, Media Contacts, March 20, 2014.

Significantly, however, the new prohibition does not distinguish between classified and unclassified intelligence information. The “covered matters” that require prior authorization before an employee may discuss them with a reporter extend to any topic that is “related” to intelligence, irrespective of its classification status.

http://boingboing.net/2014/04/22/us-intel-chiefs-insane-new-s.html/feed0How schools got desegregated ... and then resegregatedhttp://boingboing.net/2014/04/18/how-schools-got-desegregated.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/18/how-schools-got-desegregated.html#commentsFri, 18 Apr 2014 15:58:32 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=298331Incredible work by Nikole Hannah-Jones at ProPublica, following the school careers of James Dent, his daughter, and granddaughter in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.]]>Incredible work by Nikole Hannah-Jones at ProPublica, following the school careers of James Dent, his daughter, and granddaughter in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. ]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/04/18/how-schools-got-desegregated.html/feed0Video: Bart Gellman and Cory opening for Ed Snowden at SXSWhttp://boingboing.net/2014/04/17/video-bart-gellman-and-cory-o.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/17/video-bart-gellman-and-cory-o.html#commentsThu, 17 Apr 2014 11:18:34 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=298093
Last month, Barton Gellman and I opened for Edward Snowden's first-ever public appearance, at the SXSW conference in Austin. The kind folks at SXSW have put the video online (the Snowden video itself was already up).]]>

Last month, Barton Gellman and I opened for Edward Snowden's first-ever public appearance, at the SXSW conference in Austin. The kind folks at SXSW have put the video online (the Snowden video itself was already up). I think we did a good job of framing the big questions raised by the Snowden leaks.
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http://boingboing.net/2014/04/17/video-bart-gellman-and-cory-o.html/feed0Center for Public Integrity smacks down ABC bid to tag along on their Pulitzerhttp://boingboing.net/2014/04/16/center-for-public-integrity-sm.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/16/center-for-public-integrity-sm.html#commentsWed, 16 Apr 2014 18:20:18 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=297904that's apparently Nightline. ]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/04/16/center-for-public-integrity-sm.html/feed0A Vindication for the Public: Guardian and Washington Post Win Pulitzer Prize (A statement from Edward Snowden)http://boingboing.net/2014/04/14/a-vindication-for-the-public.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/14/a-vindication-for-the-public.html#commentsMon, 14 Apr 2014 21:09:13 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=297519
I am grateful to the committee for their recognition of the efforts of those involved in the last year's reporting, and join others around the world in congratulating Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, Ewen MacAskill, and all of the others at the Guardian and Washington Post on winning the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.]]>

I am grateful to the committee for their recognition of the efforts of those involved in the last year's reporting, and join others around the world in congratulating Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, Ewen MacAskill, and all of the others at the Guardian and Washington Post on winning the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Today's decision is a vindication for everyone who believes that the public has a role in government. We owe it to the efforts of the brave reporters and their colleagues who kept working in the face of extraordinary intimidation, including the forced destruction of journalistic materials, the inappropriate use of terrorism laws, and so many other means of pressure to get them to stop what the world now recognizes was work of vital public importance.

This decision reminds us that what no individual conscience can change, a free press can. My efforts would have been meaningless without the dedication, passion, and skill of these newspapers, and they have my gratitude and respect for their extraordinary service to our society. Their work has given us a better future and a more accountable democracy.

http://boingboing.net/2014/04/14/a-vindication-for-the-public.html/feed0“I F*cking Hate @RuPaul”http://boingboing.net/2014/04/04/rupaul.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/04/rupaul.html#commentsFri, 04 Apr 2014 19:08:38 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=296359Andrea James on the current state of post-disruption journalism and its unhealthy addiction to Twitter, and LGBT brain drain.]]>

Normally, a journalist making this pronouncement wouldn’t also report “objectively” about RuPaul that same day, but editors at LGBT website Advocate.com think this lack of ethics and professionalism by writer Parker Molloy is A-OK. It perfectly summarizes the current state of post-disruption journalism and its unhealthy addiction to Twitter, as well as the brain drain that has happened in LGBT media.

When not expressing hate for subjects of her reporting, Molloy is part of the eyeroll-inducing “hashtag activist” movement currently infecting the internet. Rants and beta male humorlessness once limited to blogs and social media are now creeping into other outlets. In a sign of the times, The Advocate, a venerable and respected LGBT print magazine founded almost 50 years ago, is now a separate entity from Advocate.com. The website is overseen by a separate editorial team who favors bloggers and tweeters like Molloy over journalists; quantity over quality. Molloy’s specialty is trafficking in outrage, the basest coin of the internet, and Advocate.com is harnessing Molloy’s background as a search engine marketer in its current deathmatch with HuffPo Gay Voices.

Why does Molloy, who is transgender, fucking hate RuPaul? Ru used the word “shemale” recently on RuPaul’s Drag Race and has unapologetically used a number of other taboo words over several decades, like “tranny” and what-not. Imagine that, a drag queen breaking a taboo! Any entertainer deals with hecklers, and Molloy is one of RuPaul’s. Heckler culture has grown stronger as we devolve into a society of media consumers, where everyone is a critic. The only difference between a heckler and a critic is manners, and now hecklers are apparently considered journalists.

Disdain for drag in general and RuPaul in particular has occasionally flared up from folks who transition from male to female with the zeal of a religious convert. They often dabble in online heckling like this before they inevitably flame out. The internet allows these shut-ins to spend their waking lives online, agreeing with like-minded victim cultists who share their views of acceptable transgender thought and behavior. These trans folks have developed their own pseudo-academic jargon like cis-het, which means “cisgender heterosexual,” which itself means “non-transgender straight person.” Most trans folks throwing around cis-het would have been labeled cis-het themselves a few years ago. It’s noteworthy that the most vocal anti-RuPaul hecklers are trans women who are primarily attracted to women. These newly-minted queers are derided as Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) by the anti-heckler movement. The burgeoning backlash forming on 4chan and Reddit mocks SJWs as privileged pseudo-activists who seek to hurt others using the hard-earned weight of actual political movements.

Bret Easton Ellis calls these online hecklers Generation Wuss, oversensitive precious snowflakes raised on smugfuckery via LiveJournal, Twitter, and Tumblr. They exist in every subculture and demographic, and these internecine battles rarely move beyond a community squabble. In the LGBT community a hallmark of this online “activism” is little direct face-to-face interaction with the larger community or our critics. Their primary idea of activism is insulting someone they don’t like with a tweet or post involving the crutch word fuck. So fucking brave! Like all hecklers, their attention-seeking behavior helps these self-haters feel better about themselves.

While experienced activists seek to build bridges and establish empathy between cultures, these elitists’ ideas of success involve extracting apologies from media figures for perceived slights. This just drives intolerance underground, where it manifests in more pernicious ways, winning very few over to a new way of thinking and entrenching everyone. Witness #CancelColbert.

Long-simmering anger about RuPaul hit a boiling point this month. Ru had been getting away with a different “You’ve Got She-Mail” gag on the show for a long time, but a recent episode aired a “Female or Shemale” segment, asking participants to guess whether a closeup was a drag performer or a non-trans woman. This evoked a sordid history of similar media, like Maury Povich episodes and websites presenting similar quizzes to identify the trans woman among non-trans women. In trans-land, shemale is probably the most taboo of the taboo words in the lexicon. It was popularized through its use in the most transphobic book ever written, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.

The term has come to be used almost exclusively in pornography and sex work. It easily beats out tranny, he-she, shim, and a host of hilariously offensive rhyming slurs like chicks with dicks, dolls with balls, sluts with nuts, or guys in disguise. I have personally expressed my concern about the term shemale directly to the Drag Race producers. They have issued an apology. Remarkably, the hecklers also sought to extract concessions from LGBT media watchdog GLAAD for not acting quickly enough. Effective activism takes time and involves negotiation, and I was amazed to see that GLAAD felt they had to defend themselves for not racing to Twitter and “solving” things there.

Just as gay people can be homophobic, trans people can be transphobic, and it’s not just limited to RuPaul’s recent controversy. One of Molloy’s other targets is my friend Calpernia Addams, one of many trans entertainers who came up through working in clubs as showgirls before making a gender transition. For much of the 20th century, this was the trajectory of most trans women, working alongside drag performers, but living full-time as women outside of work. As trans people become more visible and come out sooner, we have many more employment options. Recent transitioners like Molloy, who did not identify as gay before transition, are more likely to have other options, but they also often have a disdain for gay and drag culture. This is nothing new. Christine Jorgensen, who transitioned amidst an unprecedented media frenzy in 1952, was virulently homophobic and sought to distance herself from being associated with gay people. This separatism between drag and trans persists, similar to separatism some seek between crossdressers and those who live full-time in their chosen gender. Trans separatists like Molloy also spend a lot of time fighting online with lesbian separatists, some of whom reject trans lesbians the same way these trans lesbians want little to do with crossdressing or drag. The internalized transphobia behind this separatist impulse happens in any community that is finding its voice, and it’s flaring up again in the trans community.

Among the most problematic behaviors by trans separatists like Molloy is use of the term drag queen as a transphobic slur against other trans women whose politics they don’t like, including Addams and trans model Carmen Carrera. Carerra appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race prior to transition, so she is compromised and complicated from a separatist’s point of view. After I complained privately to Advocate.com editor Lucas Grindley about Molloy’s recent deliberate slurs against Calpernia, Grindley claimed Molloy’s attack was merely an “error.” Calling assimilated transgender people drag queens or crossdressers is a transphobic slur as time-honored as using their old names or former gender pronouns as insults. As I patiently explained to Grindley, if I publish a piece reporting that “Parker Molloy is a self-hating skin transvestite,” then tweet a half-assed non-apology, my use of a transphobic slur is not an error. It would be neither journalistic nor ethical, and more reputable editors would consider it a firing offense. Grindley has refused to speak with me by phone, and has refused to meet with me in person, and has refused to let me run an op-ed (hence this piece). I tried every avenue to resolve this dispute like professional journalists. Grindley is apparently too busy heckling Calpernia on Twitter about "Ugly Hearts,” her typically sweet and quirky song about internet bullying. Turns out Grindley is just further evidence of the heckler-as-journalist trend.

So now this professional dispute is public, and the dirty laundry is getting aired. The usual suspects are trolling on Twitter, and no one is really listening to each other. I used to spend a lot of time arguing on the internet. I came to see it as a form of procrastination. A search of USENET will find the exact same arguments getting rehashed by trans people since the dawn of the internet. Each new wave of users has to develop their views and voice by whatever technology is ascendant at the time, but arguing on Twitter is like debating via bumper stickers. It’s the worst of two worlds: heckling and gotcha-style journalism.

LGBT reactionaries have been throwing drag performers under the bus since the movement’s origins. You’ve seen them; elitists in our community upset at flamboyance at Gay Pride parades and so on. Transsexual women in the media who step outside the lines of “acceptable” behavior and language get the same transphobic shaming. Respectability politics will always be in conflict with drag, an art form with countercultural subversion at its heart. When these parvenus create new taboos around language, they’re practically begging drag queens and kings to violate these taboos. If it’s a choice between siding with the language police and siding with offensive artists, I’ll always side with the artist willing to risk the consequences of making an offensive joke. The right to offend people is a cornerstone of the LGBT movement, and I will always defend anyone who offends our community’s finger-wagging schoolmarms. Every movement and community needs jesters.

A few years ago I helped restore Queens At Heart, a rare color documentary of pre-Stonewall Manhattan LGBT social life. There was no separation of drag and trans, nor was there 25 years later in Paris Is Burning. We’re all in this together. Some elitists have even proclaimed that RuPaul isn’t trans. Guess I’d better burn my first edition of Leslie Feinberg’s seminal work, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul. My transgender tent proudly includes crossdressers like Dennis Rodman, or drag queens like RuPaul, or people who identify as shemale, or those throwing around the word tranny, or those whose antics anger or embarrass me. They’re still part of my trans family.

For the record, I don’t fucking hate @RuPaul. I’ve respected and admired Ru for a quarter century. I also respect and admire everyone at World of Wonder, who have created more positive transgender media depictions than any production company in history, from Transgeneration, to Becoming Chaz, to Drag Race, to my own work with them. They have been honored by the industry and the community time and again for their unwavering commitment to covering overlooked segments of the LGBT community, like their remarkable Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce, currently nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Reality Series.

Speaking of peanut butter, this week I picked up the new RuPaul candy bar, because proceeds benefit our local LGBT shelter. Then I picked up some Viva Glam lip color at MAC, which has raised millions for AIDS research since they took a risk and made Ru their face 20 years ago.

http://boingboing.net/2014/04/04/rupaul.html/feed0Britain is turning into a country that can't tell its terrorists from its journalistshttp://boingboing.net/2014/04/03/britain-is-turning-into-a-coun.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/03/britain-is-turning-into-a-coun.html#commentsThu, 03 Apr 2014 23:00:18 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=296115
Sarah Harrison, a British journalist who's worked with Wikileaks and the Snowden papers, writes that she will not enter the UK any longer because the nation's overbroad anti-terror laws, combined with the court decision that validates using them to detain journalists who are not suspected of terrorism under any reasonable definition of the term, means that she fears begin detained at the airport and then jailed as a terrorist when she refuses to decrypt her files and grant police access to her online accounts.]]>
Sarah Harrison, a British journalist who's worked with Wikileaks and the Snowden papers, writes that she will not enter the UK any longer because the nation's overbroad anti-terror laws, combined with the court decision that validates using them to detain journalists who are not suspected of terrorism under any reasonable definition of the term, means that she fears begin detained at the airport and then jailed as a terrorist when she refuses to decrypt her files and grant police access to her online accounts. Under the UK's Terrorism Act of 2000, journalists who write because they hope to expose and halt corruption are liable to being jailed as terrorists because they report on leaks in a way that is "designed to influence the government." And "the government," according to the Act, is any government, anywhere in the world -- meaning that journalists who report on leaks that embarrass any government in the world can be treated as terrorists in the UK.

Nor is this an idle risk: Glenn Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, was detained under terrorism rules when he transited through the UK, and a UK judge subsequently found that the detention was justified on these grounds, even though no one suggests that Miranda is involved in terrorism in any way. As Harrison writes, "Britain is turning into a country that can't tell its terrorists from its journalists."

The final paragraphs of Harrison's editorial sum it up neatly:

This erosion of basic human civil rights is a slippery slope. If the government can get away with spying on us – not just in collusion with, but at the behest of, the US – then what checks and balances are left for us to fall back on? Few of our representatives are doing anything to act against this abusive restriction on our press freedoms. Green MP Caroline Lucas tabled an early day motion on 29 January but only 18 MPs have signed it so far.

From my refuge in Berlin, this reeks of adopting Germany's past, rather than its future. I have thought about the extent to which British history would have been the poorer had the governments of the day had such an abusive instrument at their disposal. What would have happened to all the public campaigns carried out in an attempt to "influence the government"? I can see the suffragettes fighting for their right to vote being threatened into inaction, Jarrow marchers being labelled terrorists, and Dickens being locked up in Newgate prison.

In their willingness to ride roughshod over our traditions, British authorities and state agencies are gripped by an extremism that is every bit as dangerous to British public life as is the (real or imaginary) threat of terrorism. As Ouseley states, journalism in the UK does not possess a "constitutional status". But there can be no doubt that this country needs a freedom of speech roadmap for the years ahead. The British people should fight to show the government we will preserve our rights and our freedoms, whatever coercive measures and threats it throws at us.

http://boingboing.net/2014/04/03/britain-is-turning-into-a-coun.html/feed0Quakebot allows journalists to break news in their sleephttp://boingboing.net/2014/03/25/quakebot-allows-journalists-to.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/03/25/quakebot-allows-journalists-to.html#commentsTue, 25 Mar 2014 14:49:20 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=294249a Quakebot created by the The Los Angeles Times had already written a story breaking the news.]]>a Quakebot created by the The Los Angeles Times had already written a story breaking the news. It took humans another five minutes to copyedit and publish. ]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/03/25/quakebot-allows-journalists-to.html/feed0